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I run Gentoo Linux on my notebook and for the life of me cannot get my USB wireless adapter to work on it. I had to use a friends adapter and even with that was only usually able to crack WEP in hours instead of minutes.

What kind of adapter works best for you guys while cracking WEP with linux? Any of them faster than the rest in this regard?

Also cracking WEP is dependent on the number of weak IV's if using Aircrack-NG, You should not need more than 200k, although I've done it will around a 100k. Use Aireplay or Dsniff's macof to generate traffic so that you can accelerate the capture of the weak IV's.

Aircrack-ptw is a more efficient implementation of the FMS-style attack. It should only take you about a minute with this.

Your card should not affect the speed of cracking WEP though.

My setup is Gentoo on an IBM X41 and I use the ubiquti 300mw card with external antenna.

Yeah, like Dean mentioned, that all depends on how much traffic is flowing through the airwaves too. If you only have one other laptop connected to the WAP, you need to constantly be surfing with it and such go keep generating IV's.

I haven't really gotten in too deep with wireless hardware, but I've got an older D-Link card that seems to work fairly decently.

I have heard that Ubiquiti card mentioned quite a bit and have been considering purchasing one.

I have had very good success with my Ubiquiti card. As mentioned, the real key is how much traffic and how many IVs are being transmitted. Some networks are so alive you can just sit there with an old program like Airsnort and collect enough in a reasonable amount of time. Thats on the rare side. Most smaller networks require injecting packets and thats crucial for your card to have that ability.

Just a quick note: Aircrack-NG has the ptw attack built into the latest version as well.

if you decide to use this method (aircrack-ptw) you won't be able to use arbitrary data to generate the traffic you need as it only works with arp requests/replies as the packet types. The good thing is that with about 80k packets you have about a 90% chance of cracking the key.